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Creative Finance: Ariane Moffatt controls her own destiny

Author of the article:

Brendan Kelly • Montreal Gazette

Publishing date:

December 10, 2018 • 4 minute read

Ariane Moffatt: “I remember telling my mother in high school: ‘Mum, I want to go into music but I don’t want to eat peanut butter my whole life’. It wasn’t in my DNA to be OK with financial uncertainty. I needed to have stability.”Allen McInnis/ Montreal Gazette

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Montreal has long been a hub for creative innovators, entrepreneurs and artists. In this column, Brendan Kelly offers a snapshot of individuals pushing the boundaries of their field, looking at how they’ve managed their relationship with money in order to “make it” in their chosen domain.

Creative Finance: Ariane Moffatt controls her own destinyBack to video

Occupation: Singer-songwriter

Length of career: 18 years

Savings: Yes

Assets: A duplex in Mile End

Seed money

Ariane Moffatt knew early on that music was her calling, studying jazz singing at CEGEP St-Laurent and then going into music at the Université du Québec à Montréal. But unlike so many musicians who never give a thought at that age to anything but becoming a pop star, Moffatt did worry about how she’d make a living.

“At a very young age, I had enormous worries about my adult life and my financial responsibilities,” Moffatt said in a recent interview at a Mile End café. “I remember telling my mother in high school: ‘Mum, I want to go into music but I don’t want to eat peanut butter my whole life’. It wasn’t in my DNA to be OK with financial uncertainty. I needed to have stability.”

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Ariane Moffatt 2012.Pierre Obendrauf/Montreal Gazette file photo

One of her first jobs, while still a student, was at the Pizzédélic restaurant on Mont-Royal Ave. She had an apartment at the corner of Mont-Royal and Clark and she’d Rollerblade to work. At the time, they were doing Les Samedis du Jazz and soon enough it was Moffatt who was booking it. Often she’d join the musicians, playing drums and singing.

At the same time, she began snaring gigs as a backup singer and keyboard player with singer Marc Déry. That’s when her boss at Pizzédélic pulled her aside and told her he was letting her go because he felt she was ready to pursue her music career full time.

It wasn’t in my DNA to be OK with financial uncertainty. I needed to have stability.”

She was also writing the songs — acoustic-based introspective singer-songwriter fare — that would find their way onto her first album, Aquanaute, in 2002. She wasn’t making a ton of money but expenses were low given that she was sharing an apartment in the Plateau with a roommate, paying around $350 a month.

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The steady paycheque

The turning point in terms of financial stability was when Daniel Bélanger, one of the province’s top performers, hired her to sing backup and play keyboards on his Rêver mieux tour. Then came another turning point.

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“I was lying in my bathtub and I thought: ‘I can’t keep playing with Daniel if I want to do my own thing’. I knew I was jumping into the unknown. But I had to do it. There was a bit of vertigo but it was the right decision.”

She then signed with Audiogram, the most important record label in Quebec at the time. She was 22. Looking back, she realized that she was starting her career just at the end of a golden era for Quebec music when artists like Michel Rivard, Richard Séguin and Bélanger were regularly selling hundreds of thousands of albums. In the past 15 years, albums sales have dropped significantly. Her albums sell less now than they did then even though she is more famous now.

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The big payoff

Several years into her career, Moffatt and her manager, her sister Stéphanie Moffatt, realized the new business model was one where you had to own the rights to your work and so they took back control of the publishing on all of her catalogue, which had previously been owned by Audiogram. The Moffatt sisters also decided to co-produce the albums in partnership with her new record label, Simone Records. She also produces her own concerts.

“I had to become more independent, to be more self-sufficient,” said Moffatt.

Diversification

Moffatt also realized it was time to diversify. In 2010 she provided the soundtrack for the hit Radio-Canada TV series Trauma, performing covers of well-known English-language songs. In 2013, she was one of the four judges on the first season of La Voix on TVA, the Quebec adaptation of the music-competition show The Voice. That provided a huge promotional boost for Moffat. She also did the soundtrack for another popular Radio-Canada series Les Simone.

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“You have to be versatile,” said Moffatt. “It’s not just about money. I like doing different things. But you have to have several sources of revenue today to make up for the fact that there’s no way today that you’ll be properly compensated for the cost of making an album.”

Moffatt confirms what every other musician in the universe knows — the artists make virtually no money from streaming.

Musicians now have to make their money from touring but even that is challenging.

“Since the arrival of Netflix, people are less ready to leave home and go see a concert,” said Moffatt. “One of our biggest sources of revenue is concerts but the halls don’t fill up as easily as they used to.”

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I knew I was jumping into the unknown. But I had to do it.”

Her songs play regularly on the radio but the sophisticated electro-pop tracks on her latest album, Petites mains précieuses, are a little too alternative for the more conservative radio stations ici.

She feels like she’s running a small business but at the same time she’s a mother of three young children and “that’s my No. 1 priority”. She tries to do most of her work between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. so she can spend time with her three boys.

“It’s a new way of creating for me and it’s very stimulating,” said Moffatt.

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